1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to determining a viewing time of an online video posted on a website. More specifically, the present invention relates to determining how much time a visitor computer views an online video posted on website.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, the number of professional and amateur videos posted on websites throughout the Internet has substantially increased along with the popularity of viewing such professional and amateur videos. Several factors may be responsible for this substantial increase including the creation of websites dedicated to promoting such professional and amateur videos.
Alternan, U.S. Patent Publication Number 2006/0048186, for a Method And Apparatus For Storing And Accessing Videos From A Remote Location discloses an application service platform that allows websites to accept video uploads, and which also includes a method for tracking the number of times the video was accessed or viewed on the website.
Tufts, U.S. Pat. No. 7,159,023, for a Use Of Web Usage Trail Data To Identify Relationships Between Browsable Items, discloses a method for determining related links to a website using usage trails of a population of users that have accessed the website.
Tufts, U.S. Pat. No. 6,691,163, for a Use Of Web Usage Trail Data To Identify RelatedLinks, discloses a method for determining related links to a website using usage trails of a population of users that have accessed the website.
Kahle et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,165,069, for an Analysis Of Search Activities Of Users To Identify Related Network Sites, discloses a system and method for identifying related network sites by accumulating search activity data and analyzing the search activity data.
Glommen et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,766,370, for an Internet Website Traffic Flow Analysis Using Timestamp Data, discloses using a cookie which is small enough to pass from server to browser without negatively affecting performance in order to generate a time duration of a current sequence of requested documents by a network browser.
Krzanowski, U.S. Patent Publication Number 2005/0246651, for a System, Method And Apparatus For Selecting, Displaying, Managing, Tracking And Transferring Access To Content Of Web Pages And Other Sources, discloses the previous in regard to web pages including online videos.
Muret et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,792,458, for a System And Method For Monitoring And Analyzing Internet Traffic, discloses using a log engine with log files to monitor hits from visitors to a website.
Glommen et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,393,479, for an Internet Website Traffic Flow Analysis, discloses using a cookie which is small enough to pass from server to browser without negatively affecting performance in order to generate a real-time traffic at the site.
Burner et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,282,548, for an Automatically Generate And Displaying Metadata As Supplemental Information Concurrently With The Web Page, There Being No Link Between Web Page And Metadata, discloses determining a web page address which is sent to a metadata server and displayed.
Keezer et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,085,736, for Rules Based Identification Of Items Represented On Web Pages, discloses using a document object model of a web page to extract data from a website.
Many websites provide a “total” number of traffic received by a given item on their website—where an “item” can be a video file, audio file, web page, downloadable file, article; and where “traffic” can be page views, downloads, incoming links, or plays.
Singh et al., U.S. Patent Publication Number 2003/0171977, for a Clickstream Analysis Methods And Systems, discloses modifying off-line businesses based on identified characteristics obtained by online actions.
Most websites fail to state the time or date over which the traffic was received. This is because doing so would require additional programming, doing so would consume unnecessary disk space and processing time, and/or such information may not be important to the site owners.
This information, however, can be important to other parties. For example, determining traffic over time of a video or article may be important to advertisers and promoters interested in determining Internet trends.
Where previously a web item resided on only one website, the recent exposition of media hosting websites has given rise to a large redundancy of similar/identical files on different websites. This redundancy creates a demand for a method to aggregate traffic information from different websites about a similar item in order to determine the traffic of that item across the entire Internet. However, the prior art has failed to provide a means to address this problem.
The Internet also allows for websites to distribute a much larger selection of content than other methods of distribution such as stores, radio, and television. Because of this, traffic to items (such as video files, audio files, web pages, downloads, articles, or sales) on a website or group of websites fit into a “long tail distribution” where the highest ranked items each receive a very large amount of traffic while the vast majority of the lesser ranked items each receive relatively little traffic. Where “traffic” can be a view, a download, a link, or a sale. When graphed with the traffic to each item plotted on the y-axis and the items ranked by popularity on the x-axis, the curve formed can be approximated by the equation y=abcx for x>0, where a and b are positive constants and c is a negative constant.
While it is possible to get an exact count of such a website's traffic, there are many problems in attempting to do so. First, because such a website can potentially receive tens of millions of viewers per day, it is technologically impractical to get an exact count of traffic by recording every view since doing so would dramatically increase the required disk space and processing power of the server. Second, a third-party cannot get an exact count of a website's traffic without requiring that website to add various forms of code it the website. Many websites are reluctant to add such codes to their website because it decreases the loading speed and creates possible security threats.
Another problem associated with videos on the Internet is approximating standard viewership over multiple websites. There are many Internet video hosts and a single video may be hosted on several of these sites. Because of this, it becomes useful to aggregate the statistics from all of these websites to determine the overall viewership of a video. Different video websites, however, have different criteria for determining viewership, particularly a “view” or “play,” and this creates a need to weight numbers from the various sites based on their criteria. For example, a first web site may register one view every time the video page is visited, a second web site may register one view only the first time a person visits the video page, and a third web site may only register one view once the video is played to the end. The prior art has failed to provide a solution to this problem.